1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates in general to computers, and more particularly to a method and computer program product for providing on-demand storage capacity on a remote storage server to a customer.
2. Description of the Related Art
Computers, and accompanying data storage, are commonplace in today's society. Individuals, businesses, organizations, and the like have a need for a certain amount of data storage. Historically, data has been stored on local storage devices, such as tape drives, hard disk drives (HDDs), and removable media such as compact discs (CDs) and digital versatile discs (DVDs). As more of society becomes digital, the need for data storage has generally increased.
In many cases, customers may see an immediate need for additional data storage. For example, a business may obtain a large new account, or a service provider may require increased storage capacity to provide support for a particular upcoming event, such as an election. Vendors of data storage have seen to this need, in some cases, by including unused storage in the hardware provided to the customer, but in a disabled state. This allows the customer to “purchase” the unused storage on-demand at a later date. The storage is enabled when requested, and is immediately available. This feature may be referred to as “step-ahead storage.”
Step-ahead storage in the traditional sense may be problematic to a vendor in some situations. For example, regardless of whether a customer actually uses the storage, the vendor provides storage hardware at a fixed cost. Additionally, the added hardware is generally fixed to a particular machine, so that step-ahead storage capacity allocated to a first machine may not be usable by a second machine which has run out of storage space. Finally, if the amount of step-ahead storage is underestimated at time of purchase, any storage requested beyond the original amount must be installed manually with the accompanying long and costly install times normally associated with installing new or additional hardware.